With a population of 42.16 million most of the women in Chennai (North, South and Central) are engaged in informal sector activities, both as micro entrepreneurs and as casual wage labourers in low paid, low working capital, low skill and low subsistence occupations. These micro entrepreneurs are very innovative in devising adaptive strategies for survival. Most often they are constrained by lack of finance, high interest payments and lack of markets, space and mobility. The Forum under its credit programme provided credit assistance to more than 250 different occupations to these women workers in the urban informal sector, saving them from moneylenders and pawnbrokers. They are mostly vendors, hawkers and service specialists like dhobis and so on. Today the Chennai programme reaches 50003 poor women in 1721 slum neighbourhoods.